Note: After downloading Azure Data Studio, say Yes to enabling preview features so that you can use extensions.

Azure Data Studio is a multi-database, cross-platform desktop environment for data professionals using the family of on-premises and cloud data platforms on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. To learn more, visit our GitHub.

Launch SSMS dialogs from Azure Data Studio

For our Windows users, we want to make it even easier for you to use Azure Data Studio with SQL Server Management Studio. With this release, we’re making it possible to launch certain SSMS dialogs from Azure Data Studio. This gives you access to some of the most used experiences in SSMS without needing to context switch between tools.

On the flipside, with SSMS 18.0, users can already right-click on a server and open the server in Azure Data Studio as a new query window or new notebook and still pass along the connection. When users have Azure Data Studio installed, they can quickly start creating a SQL Notebook in the server they are already working with.

With CMS and better SSMS integration, we will continue to listen to your requests, so please continue to let us know what you would like to see in Azure Data Studio.

Central Management Servers (CMS) extension

As our team presented in SQL Server sessions across the country, users in person and on GitHub told us that they couldn’t start using Azure Data Studio in their daily work streams until X feature was implemented. One of the most requested of these features is Central Management Servers support, and we are excited to announce the preview release of the CMS extension.

For those unfamiliar with CMS, CMS servers store a list of instances of SQL Server that is organized into one or more central manager server groups. Users can connect to their own existing CMS server and manage their server by adding and removing servers.

Schema Compare improvements

Last month, we announced the preview release of the Schema Compare extension. This represents how we continue to bring developer experiences into Azure Data Studio.

One important feature was to add Exclude and Include options. By default, all schema differences are included in the scope of the Update Target action. We have now added the ability to exclude certain differences from the comparison to provide users more choice over schema changes. This is shown in the gif below:

Moved Messages section to its own tab

Since we released Azure Data Studio, the Results panel and Messages panel were stacked on top of each other, and users told us they would prefer the UI real estate provided more room to view the full results or messages.

Due to this highly requested feature, we have moved Messages into its own tab on the same panel. Now, users can select between Results and Messages rather than viewing each on top of each other.

This behavior is similar to SQL Server Management Studio, and will give users more space to view their query results and possible error messages. Let us know on GitHub if you have any additional requests with this UI change.

Separate Insiders build

In the past few months, we have added features like Schema Compare, Central Management Servers, and other features in our Insiders build so that users can get a sneak peek of new features we are working on. We’re grateful to many of you who have been using our Insiders build and provided us feedback before we officially launched the feature into our stable monthly release.

To make it easier for anyone to try our Insiders build, we’ve added an Insiders tag to any build that is not from the stable monthly build of Azure Data Studio, as shown below:

This makes it easier for users to know which build is Insiders and which one is the stable build. Now that it is easier to differentiate between the builds, we encourage you try our Insiders builds to get early access to our preview features. You can download it by going to the Insiders Build section of GitHub (Insiders builds are below the table with our stable builds).

Notebook improvements

SQL Notebooks continues to be adopted by more and more users for demos, troubleshooting, education, and documentation. As we continue to bring new features in Notebooks, we’ve focused on quality and performance to make sure notebooks are a first-class experience for our users.

Users can now choose to use their own Python 3 or Anaconda installs in notebooks

Visual Studio Code April release merge 1.34

As mentioned in the March release blog, we are picking up changes from Visual Studio Code even faster. In the past, we were usually three updates behind, but the community has asked for getting Visual Studio Code features even faster. Your feedback was noted, so we now have improvements from the VS Code April release.

Bug fixes

If you would like to help continue making Azure Data Studio a great product, please share any feedback or report issues through our Issues page. Our engineering team regularly reviews the untriaged issues and assigns issues into different monthly milestones so that you know what we are working on it. Your votes on issues helps us prioritize.